Friday, February 25, 2005

Biblical arguments for the Trinity, part 3

Yesterday, I gave one argument for the deity of Jesus. Today, I'm going to give some more.

This first argument I got from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason, and his version is published in an article called Deity of Christ: Case Closed

The argument comes from John 1:3 which says, "All things came into being by him, and apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being."

You can break up all of reality into two categories--things that came into being and things that did not come into being. The only thing that did not come into being is God. God is eternal. He has always existed. Everything else came into being at some point.

The question we need to ask is which category Jesus fits in. If Jesus came into being, then he's not God. If he did not come into being, then he is God.

If we look carefully at John 1:3, we can see that it's impossible for Jesus to have come into being. According to John 1:3, everything that came into being, came into being through Jesus. The only way, then, for Jesus to have come into being is if he came into being through himself. But that would require that Jesus existed before he came into being, which is crazy talk. Only a post-modernist would embrace such a contradiction! Since Jesus did not come into being, he has always existed. He's external, and therefore, he's God.

There are a few more arguments I'm going to give for the deity of Jesus, and these won't require as much explaining as the previous two. These next three arguments show that Jesus is YHWH. The reason it's important to establish that Jesus is YHWH is to prevent anybody from saying Jesus is god with a little "g," which they might do if they only accepted the arguments from Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1.

1. YHWH created the heavens and the earth by himself; he was all alone (Isaiah 44:24).
2. Jesus created the heavens and the earth; he was with God (Colossians 1:15-17, John 1:1-3).
3. Therefore, Jesus is YHWH.

Here's another one:

1. YHWH will not give his glory to another (Isaiah 42:8; 48:11).
2. Jesus shares God's glory (John 17:5, 5:23).
3. Therefore, Jesus is YHWH.

One last argument. Psalm 102:25 is attributed to YHWH in the Old Testament, but when it's quoted in Hebrews 1:10, it's attributed to Jesus.

That's all the arguments I'm going to give for the deity of Jesus.

For the Trinity, part 4

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

^ drRic, your responses to this blog post are absurd. There's no reason to think that Jesus' being God implies a numerical identification thesis between himself, God and the father, which would in fact make them the same person. Trinitarians have always talked about divinity in terms of quality. In the one eternal being who is YHWH there exists three distinct coequal and coeternal divine persons. Once you flesh out here what it means to be divine and to be the one God and dstinct, you will not arrive at the accusation you allege.